ARCHIVES: Storygridding The Tipping Point

The Ending Payoff of The Tipping Point does not disappoint. Remember the David Mamet quote about how Stories work in his book Bambi vs. Godzilla? They start with a simple premise and proceed logically, and inevitably, toward a conclusion both surprising and inevitable. So what is the surprising and inevitable conclusion of The Tipping Point? […]

When I finished plotting the global value movements from scene to scene for The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell, the first thing that popped out was how well Gladwell put into practice what he speaks so clearly about in the book itself. Specifically, the necessity of putting the “clues” of your Story in the proper […]

You didn’t think I wasn’t going to combine my macro (The Foolscap Global Story Grid) and my micro (The Story Grid Spreadsheet) for The Tipping Point and create a super-cool Story Grid infographic, did you? I can’t begin to describe the internal resistance I’ve battled pulling this together. Judging from the reactions, or lack of reactions […]

So what’s the big payoff for The Tipping Point? A step by step recipe to take a lousy product and make it a word of mouth sensation? A feel good celebration of mass behavior? Not even close. There is not a Hush Puppy or Muppet to be found in this crucial last section of Gladwell’s […]

One glance at The Story Grid Spreadsheet for Malcolm Gladwell’s Middle Build for The Tipping Point is all one needs to understand just how much work the man put into this book. The research and story examples he uses to build his Three Law argument to support his Tipping Point theory are extraordinary. It is […]

How does one begin the editorial process? You’ve got a first draft of your Big Idea book of nonfiction and you’re not sure what to do next. You know that the manuscript is probably loaded with small and not so small problems, but you have no idea what or where they are. What to do? […]